Tag Archives: theatre

I once made a list of my Top Ten Films and the list had 40 movies on it. What is more, if I had made the list a year before, or a year later, the 40 movies might have been quite different. One cannot really pick a permanent set.

So, when Classics Today executive editor David Hurwitz published his list of “12 Operas I Cannot Live Without,” and challenged his audience to come up with their own lists, the same problem popped up. “You mean the dozen I cannot live without today?”

While I love opera, like Hurwitz, I have to admit I am not an opera nut. That’s a different breed. Opera does seem to attract the crazies — the ones who swear by a 1948 barely audible recording, made over a telephone line, of Maria Callas singing La Sonnambula — in the unauthorized 1848 edition only performed once, in Belfast, Ireland in 1873. You know, the one with the interpolated aria in Act 2. Yes, crazy like that.

I have been listening to classical music for more than 60 years, and am a classical music generalist: I love it all, from pianists to chamber music to symphonic and vocal music — and, of course, opera. But opera has no special place for me. Opera people care who the tenor is; I am more interested in the composer, which means I’m not included in the opera inner circle.

So, my list is not made up of the usual names: Verdi, Bellini, Puccini, and doesn’t automatically include the ABCs of opera popularity — Aida, Boheme, Carmen. It’s not that I dislike them, but I have seen them enough times that I don’t need to experience them yet again. They will always sell enough tickets, even without my attendance.

These are the works that I choose when I want to hear opera, to enjoy the music in them and the emotions they arouse. I could list more than 12, but Hurwitz’s assignment limits the number — although I might cheat a bit.

1. Handel: Rodelinda

The first opera I ever attended was in 1966 when the Handel Society of New York staged Rodelinda at Carnegie Hall with Teresa Stich-Randall and Maureen Forrester with a pick-up pit orchestra conducted by Brian Priestman. I couldn’t stop humming the tunes.

Years later, I found a three-disk LP album of the opera in a smooshed-up box in a thrift store. I don’t remember who performed it, probably some Eastern Europe company on a back-water label no one’s ever heard of. I played it over and over. The familiar melodies were comforting.

The same year I saw Rodelinda, the same group also performed Xerxes and I saw that, too. Since, I have seen Giulio Cesare live and a truly brilliant staging of Semele by the Arizona Opera Company, but it is Rodelinda that sticks.

2. Mozart: Don Giovanni

The opera I have seen most, and that I love as music as well as theater, is Don Giovanni. I’ve seen it more often than any other live opera (except the infinite Bohemes and Carmens I saw through duty as my newspaper’s opera critic).

Most operas, even the really good ones, can not be defended on the basis of their plots, which are, at best, nonsensical and goofy. But Don Giovanni has a story with action, believable characterizations, and psychological subtlety. To say nothing of some really great tunes.

And it is a truly revolutionary work, written at a revolutionary moment in history. I love when the partygoers at the end of the first act just kind of stop everything and belt out the words, “Viva la Libertad!” And also that, at the end, the Don has the courage to refuse to repent. He may be the villain of the piece, but he is also the hero.

I’ve owned a half-dozen versions of the piece on LP and now CD, but my go-to performance is the oddly cinematic, opened-up film staging with Cesare Siepi as the Don, and conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, available on DVD.

3. Mozart: Nozze di Figaro

On his list, Hurwitz permits only one opera per composer, but I can’t do that, because the three operas I love most, and can listen to over and over, are all by Mozart. Years ago, I wrote about what I was calling the “perfect” operas — that is, those with no longueurs, boring parts, added and unnecessary show-off arias to highlight the tenor or soprano. These are operas with plots that are defensible, if not great, pacing that doesn’t drag, and some level of human reality in them.

By any of those standards La Nozze di Figaro tops the list. These are all real people doing real people things, hurting like real people, loving like real people, and most importantly, forgiving like real people. And, all the the perfectly psychologically apt music of Mozart. If I were to choose the best opera ever written, this would be it.

4. Mozart: Zauberflöte

Talk of silly plots: Just about the worst story in opera is found in one of the most popular works. Everything about the story in The Magic Flute is preposterous. But the music is so infectious, you give up and don’t care.

Especially if you get to see the staging by Julie Taymor with its giant bunraku puppets. It is stage magic along with great music. It is a slightly abridged version and sung in English, but it is so good, and so much fun, you really have to watch it.

Or there’s Ingmar Bergman’s film version, sung in Swedish, which captures all the fairy-tale flavor of the thing. But really, there are dozens of recorded versions, both on CD for listening and DVD or Blu-Ray for watching.

5. Berlioz: Le Damnation de Faust

I hadn’t ever thought of it as an opera, but I saw the Metropolitan Opera staging of it in 2009 and was persuaded: It works really well in that Postmodern presentation. Actually thrilling.

As with so much of Berlioz, its reach much exceeds its grasp. Since the composer couldn’t include everything from even Part 1 of Goethe’s Faust, he chose to pick episodes to put to music, making a rather choppy story. Still, the music can be overwhelming when performed with the right belief and energy.

6. Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen

I’ve attended two live Ring cycles, which were quite magnificent (although I am humbled by the fact my dear friend, the late Dimitri Drobatschewsky went to Bayreuth 16 times). But I have to admit this four-opera trilogy (yes, that’s an oxymoron) is best heard on recordings. Not so much because with the great voices of the past, the singing is better (although that is true), but because the action in these “music dramas” is so mythic, and so German Romantic, that no scenery or stage machinery can adequately portray the Rhine maidens singing underwater, the valkyries riding their horses in the air, the gods crossing a rainbow bridge, or the Rhine river overflowing its banks to quench the fire that has set alight the entire world and ended the reign of the gods. Watching it onstage can seem a little tawdry.

But listening to the recording with your eyes closed and imagining the rocky crags, the dark forests, the ring of fire on the mountain top, is so much more convincing as theater of the mind. I say with eyes closed, but you really also need to read the libretto as you listen. Or not libretto — that sounds too much like opera — Wagner doesn’t have a libretto; he has a text.

I have five Ring cycles on CD (Barenboim, Böhm, Furtwängler, Janowski and Solti) and another two on DVD (Boulez and Levine). Is that a little nuts? I suppose. The one I listen too over and over is Solti, which was specifically designed to be played on speakers, with various sound effects added to it by producer John Culshaw.

And yes, I’m counting all 15 hours of the Ring as a single entry.

7. Offenbach: Les Contes d’Hoffmann

If the Ring is too serious, The Tales of Hoffmann counters with frivolity. I love this mini-trilogy (in four parts), especially when all three heroines are sung by the same soprano.

It has some of the chunky episodic feeling of the Berlioz, (compare the Chanson de Kleinzach tavern song here with Mephistopheles’ Song of the Flea in Damnation. Both completely extrinsic to the story, but a chance for the composers to interpolate a great bit of ditty.

The opera is a bit of a mess, as Offenbach never settled on a final version. But any version is a delight.

8. Strauss: Salome

I’ve seen several versions of Richard Strauss’ first opera, and it always seems to work on stage. It’s a short one, in a single act and tells of King Herod, his wife and daughter — Salome — and the prisoner John the Baptist, who Salome has a “thing” for. The prophet rejects her advances and she dances a striptease and has her daddy behead the prophet, whereupon she kisses the severed head. Grand Guignol, for sure, but great music and a surefire staging.

If the Ring fares best on recording, this opera needs to be seen live (or at least on DVD). It is as much theater as music.

9. Bartok: Bluebeard’s Castle

Another short, one-act work of psycho-sexual complexity, Bela Bartok’s early work, which seems to take place entirely in the nation of Allegory, tells the story of Duke Bluebeard and his new wife, who can’t seem to let alone the secrets of her husband’s previous marriages. She forces the secrets out and winds up prisoned with all of them. All very Freudian.

Those secrets are hidden behind doors, and as she opens each door, she finds a world of shimmering music and deadly horrors. There are only two singers/actors in this story, one who wants to uncover the past, and the other who begs her to let them lie. But it is the impressionistic score that makes this work so irresistible.

10. Berg: Wozzeck

There is a second “perfect” opera, after The Marriage of Figaro, one with no unnecessary bits, and everything leading to a single inescapable and shattering climax. It is written in a sort of atonal, 12-tone style (purely Berg’s own version) and is both musically inevitable, and emotionally devastating. Too many people avoid this work, fearing the music will be too dissonant, but every note serves a purpose, and even those fearing to enter the opera house will likely leave knowing they have experienced a work of utter genius.

I claim Wozzeck as my favorite opera of all. There are many versions on disc. This is another one, like Salome, where it is so well designed for performance that almost any version will do, and it’s amazing how many versions there are on Amazon. A serial opera that is actually popular!

11. Adams: Nixon in China

Initially, I thought this piece by John Adams was a gimmick, but I saw it performed in concert by the Phoenix Symphony under Michael Christie and it blew me away. As no other contemporary work for the opera stage, this has joined the repertoire. (Did anyone else notice how the showstopping aria, “I am the wife of Mao Tse Tung” is a gloss on the“Tuba Mirum” section of Mozart’s Requiem?)

No other figure in recent American history figures as so deeply mythic as Richard Nixon — a version of Nixon he seems to have bought into himself (check out the opening line of his autobiography: “I was born in the house my father built.” Can’t get much more Jungian.)

12. Golijov: Ainadamar

Christie also brought Dawn Upshaw to Phoenix to perform Osvaldo Golijov’s Postmodern take on the death of Spanish poet Garcia Lorca. With its mix of musical styles and bouncy, infectious score, it tells of the Spanish actress Margarita Xirgu, who recounts the life and execution of her friend Lorca.

Like all great tragedies, it is both depressing at emotionally exhilarating at the same time. To say nothing of it now being an uncomfortably historical warning about fascist governments.

There seems to be only a single recording of the opera, but with Upshaw in the lead role. The opera led me to seek out other music by Golijov, and I have loved all of it.

Postlude

You may wonder, where is Verdi? Rossini? Puccini? Are they not worthy? Of course they are, and I love them, too. And how can I have omitted Rosenkavalier, which I love to pieces? There is so much more that could have been included, from Monteverdi’s Orfeo to Weill’s Dreigroschenoper.

But this is a list of operas I can’t live without, the ones closest to my heart. The one’s that will make me actually buy tickets. Your list will be different, but if my selection prompts you to try something new, so much the better.

And, finally, seeing opera (with one exception, noted above) is always better than just hearing it. Live is best of all, but DVDs will do in a pinch, and many movie theaters present showings of operas live on their screens, most famously the Metropolitan Opera. Check with your local theaters to see where such performances might be scheduled.

La vie de Bohème

December 31, 2024

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When I see photographs of myself in my 20s, I am deeply embarrassed. I seemed to be play-acting in some fictional version of the life I believed I was living, or wanted desperately to be living. I clearly thought I was ripe for la vie de Bohème.

I am probably not alone in this. From the onset of adolescence, most of us, I believe, are trying to figure out who we are, and believe — quite wrongly as it turns out — that we have some choice in this.

For me, as for quite a few in my generation, coming of age in the Eisenhower years, the banal middle-class life was something we wanted to escape. The world of art and artists — or poetry and poets — seemed so much more vital, so much more real.

It was in the air. Breathless, with Jean-Paul Belmondo, came out in 1960, when I was 12 years old. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was released in 1957. In the same year, Alan Watts produced his Way of Zen. All of these things presented a way of life that seemed to this unformed New Jersey boy so much more real — so much more important — than buying annual new school clothes at the Paramus mall.

“What are you rebelling against?” “Whatya got?” Maynard G. Krebs.

My parents were reasonably intelligent, but they were not college educated and they were not readers. I thought at the time they were intolerably boring. I read everything I could get my fingers on, including books that were way above my puny ability at that age to comprehend. I thought bourgeois respectability was the enemy, and in a fit of juvenile delinquency, I would stuff paperbacks from the book rack in the local drug store into my pocket and make off with them. I thought I was so daring, so rebellious. By real-life standards, it was pathetic; the real thugs in my town were Mafia kids and all the books I took were literary:

John Updike’s The Centaur; Malcolm by James Purdy; John Knowles’ A Separate Peace; The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth; A Death in the Family by James Agee — you get the picture. As I look back on it now, I’m pretty sure that Everett, the pharmacist, knew what I was doing, but recognized that they were likely books that would never sell anyway in suburban New Jersey and that I would benefit from reading those books more than he would from keeping them dusty on his book rack.

I bought a subscription to Evergreen Review and another to Paul Krassner’s The Realist. And just to go the extra length of high-school pretentiousness, I also got a subscription to Les Temps Moderne, although I knew no French. But, it was Jean-Paul Sartre’s magazine and I knew he was important. I was desperate to join the grown-up world of truly important things — not like the pep rallies and gym classes of high school.

The attraction of the bohemian life were all too apparent to me then, and all through my college years and into my 20s. It was a fantasy enriched by exposure to literature; actual bohemians were sparse on the ground in Bergen County. The tradition of poor scholars, thumbing their noses at conformity is long, and goes back at least to the Roman poet Catullus. I found a used copy of Francois Villon’s Testament and then, there was Goethe’s Faust and Puccini’s opera, La Bohème.

As I headed off to college, I imagined myself as one of those louche students, full of sex and alcohol, but also drunk on great books and music and art. Of course, there were others there who shared that vision and we became friends, like Rodolfo, Marcello, Shaunard, Colline, Mimi and Musetta.

Or so we imagined ourselves. I was filled with an exaggerated sense of art and literature, but lagged in classwork. I’m sure I read more than my curriculum required, but rather less of those texts assigned in class. After all, textbooks were dull and Dostoevsky was not.

We knew we were “special,” and that we would become, if not famous, at least important. My best friend and I self-published a slim volume of our poetry and titled the thing 1798, after the year Wordsworth and Coleridge published their Lyrical Ballads. Their poetry changed the climate for literature for the next hundred years; we expected ours would do the same. Being important was important to our yet unformed selves.

Rae, Aime and Alex

After graduation, with a first wife, I lived that sort of poverty, in a cheap rental apartment on the second floor of an old house, entered from stairs rising up the outside, and heated with a single kerosene stove in the living room and we ate from a book titled Dinner for Two on a Dollar a Day. I had a job paying minimum wage as a clerk in a camera store, and I found living on no money intoxicating. My first wife found it less so. A punctuation mark in the bio. Full stop.

Sandro and Mu; me and S; Cap’n Billy and Tiggy

Later, and with the succeeding unofficial wife, we lived in a duplex. I still worked in the camera store, and she was a cashier in a supermarket. We managed to save enough money to buy gear to hike the Appalachian Trail. We quit our jobs and took off for the woods. When we discovered that goal-oriented hiking (making the required miles per day to reach the next lean-to) was less glamorous than we thought, we gave up in northern Virginia and returned to Greensboro.

After that came some time on unemployment benefits and meeting up with fellow bohos in local bars, betting quarters on air hockey. Being poor was never a problem: It was exotic. We were still sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and having friends over for feasts, and at least once a year, with friends, renting a venue and holding a masked ball where we waltzed into the wee hours of the next day.

Ursus, Colin, and Spider in Seattle

But then, she left to get married and I was pole-axed. I hadn’t known. I gave up everything (well, except my books), and moved from North Carolina to Seattle, where I lived with my old chum, Ursus, who was then a bicycle messenger in the city. I was offered a spot in the coal bin in the basement, and lived more vie bohème on a mattress on the concrete floor. Being jobless gave me time for a lot of reading.

I eventually got a job at the zoo, and became crazy about a zookeeper I fell for, but depression wore me down.

And so, I moved back to the South and lived with my 1798 co-author and his wife. They gave me a room in their old farmhouse, with its only heat being a wood stove in the kitchen. I did the cooking and maintenance work while they went to work. A few daylong pick-up jobs and I earned a total of $900 for the entire year. It seemed sufficient. This was truly la vie de bohème.

My second official wife invited me to visit in the Blue Ridge and eventually, I moved in with her and her teenage daughter. Still no job, still poor as a midge and happy as a clam. But I was now over 30 years old and never had a real job. It was beginning to wear thin.

I mention all of this because I recently watched a 1992 film by Finnish moviemaker Aki Kaurismäki called La Vie de Bohème and based on the 1851 novel Scènes de la vie de bohème by French author Henri Murger, which, in turn, was the source for Puccini’s opera.

Henri Murger by Nadar, 1857

It is in many ways a brutal and heartbreaking film, mainly because, unlike the opera with its young heroes, flush with romantic enthusiasms, the movie shows us a more realistic vision of bohemians, now in their 40s, and looking pretty sad. It’s fine for 20-somethings to live their fantasies; but given greying hair, paunches and ratty clothes, at 40 living such a life seems like utter failure. Not only in career, but more important, as persons. They have not found who they really are, but have worn holes in the soles of who they try to be.

These are people who had grand ambitions when young. They were going to be writers, thinkers, painters. And they each now do piecework on commission for a few dollars and do their best to avoid creditors and landlords. When our writer falls in love with a worn-looking 43-year-old Mimi, he finds himself deported to his native Albania. When he sneaks back much later, he finds Mimi is dying. It’s all much as in the opera, only everyone is at least 20 years older.

But the love between Mimi and her man is so much more real and touching, because it is adults who need each other rather than youths living out some romantic fantasy, and Mimi’s death, in the hospital, is an actual death rather than a dramatic set-piece. Life has stomped on the youthful delusion.

For me, it was my second marriage, which lasted 35 years, until my wife’s death, that turned me into who I was rather than who I played at being. It can be a long process to something approaching reality.

I don’t know if any of us can ever know who we really are, but we all know who we think we are. Most of us, as we get older, grow closer and closer to who we truly are; when we are young and full of ourselves, we live a mythologized sense of ourselves. A much more important sense of ourselves. We are going to change the world. In truth we are ordinary.

As one grows older, the graph plotting the importance of one’s internal sense of self, the mythology of autobiography begins to tail off, dropping down the chart, while the realization of who we truly are begins to climb, and there comes a point — for me, it was in my mid-30s — when the two lines cross. For some it marks the “mid-like crisis” and one can choose to attempt to grasp after the myth and buy a sportscar, or one recognizes that the actuality is more solid, more real, and more meaningful than the fantasy.

The young sense of self is a choice — a mask you wear or a role you play — and maybe you try to live up to it, but it is always a pose. The longer you hold on to it, the more you feel like an imposter. Who you are is not a choice: It is a given, and it can slowly reveal itself over time as you give up the pose. Maybe you give up the pose out of exhaustion, maybe out of a seeking of self-knowledge. Either way, it is why older people often feel so much more comfortable with themselves, so much less worried over what “others think.”

And for me, I have given up rebelling against the bourgeoisie. I have never joined in. I have too many books. But let them be who they are and let me be me.

Culture 2.0

January 18, 2014

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What is culture, and why should we care?

These are questions that don’t get asked often enough when we discuss such inflammatory issues as government funding of the arts and humanities.

To many people, culture simply means a lot of wealthy people going to the opera and sitting through a hare-brained story in a language they don’t understand while listening to a soprano shriek so loud their elbows go numb.

Or it means drinking bad white wine from a plastic champagne glass at an art gallery opening or long, dense scholarly papers deconstructing Little Red Riding Hood as a text about the patriarchal hegemony.

We too often talk about culture as if it meant only evenings in the theater and long Russian novels.

But what would happen if all these so-called ”high” arts suddenly disappeared? Do we actually need them?

To understand the answer, we need to understand what culture is. Culture is broader than just the arts.

It’s what you eat for breakfast and whether your trousers have cuffs. It is who you are allowed to marry and what happens to your body when you die.

Culture is the set of rules — mostly in the form of traditions — by which society runs.

It is the software for our social lives.

In fact, far from being a luxury, culture is something you cannot live without. It is religion, art, laws, ethics, history and even our clothing.

Culture is who we are.

And who we are at this moment: No culture is static. It is an evolving thing — to keep up with the computer metaphor, there are constant upgrades. Culture 2.7 gives way to Culture 3.0, as the circumstances of our lives and our cultural needs change. The culture of the clipper ship means little on a jumbo jet.

Yet, although culture changes, it is inherently conservative. It changes very slowly. Nobody wants to get caught with a beta version of untested software.

Patterns from our ancestors persist in our lives. We enter the jumbo jet from the left side because our great-grandfathers wore their swords on their left sides and consequently mounted their horses from the left, to avoid entangling their swords.

You can see the history of aviation change from the stirrup on the left side of a World War I biplane to the door on a 747.

And how many children today play with ”choo-choo trains,” although not even their parents ever lived in a world with steam locomotives?

The patterns stick with us even when they no longer make sense.

But culture does change. The three-minute song remains the cultural pattern, although Dinah Shore has given way to Taylor Swift.

Songs from our agricultural past, lauding springtime and the moon, make little sense to our urban present, where nocturnal lighting is more likely neon. So we change. Slowly.

And where does cultural change come from? More often than not, from the arts.

The arts try out possible ideas onstage to see if they might make sense. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. But the best minds and imaginations give it their best.

That is why we think of theater as ”culture.” Or literature, or painting.

Yes, there are some people who want to keep their old software version, and some who want to return to earlier versions. But culture cannot stand still.

Therefore, we need to be on the lookout for meaningful directions to go in. Art is our investigation of our values, testing them and throwing out some and reinforcing others.

Without art, culture ossifies and the people become emotionally and spiritually dead. So, if we mean to maintain a vital culture, we must support the best in the arts.

There is another computer saying: GIGO — garbage in, garbage out. In other words, if we don’t care for the changes in our culture, we are likely to wind up with the lowest common denominator. We are likely to wind up with nothing more than Duck Dynasty and microwave pizza.

—Richard Nilsen

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